*One of Literary Hub's "Ten Works of Literary Horror You Should Read (Even if You Don't Think You Like Horror)"*A pulsating psycho-thriller from Ryu Murakami, author of In the Miso SoupA renaissance man for the postmodern age, Ryu Murakami—a musician, filmmaker (Tokyo Decadence), TV personality, and award-winning author—has gained a cult following in the West. His first novel, Almost Transparent Blue, won Japan’s most coveted literary prize and sold over a million copies, and his most recent psychosexual thriller, In the Miso Soup, gave readers a further taste of his incredibly agile imagination. In Piercing, Murakami, in his own unique style, explores themes of child abuse and what happens to the voiceless among us, weaving a disturbing, spare tale of two people who find each other and then are forced into hurting each other deeply because of the haunting specter of their own abuse as children.

Piercing

Literature & Fiction

Ryū Murakami

Literary

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Title: Audition

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Thrillers & Suspense

BLOOMSBURY

Almost Transparent Blue

A youth of college age, his older mistress, friends--random friends, they might be called--living near an American military base and experimenting with drugs both hard and soft. 
In rapidly sketched scenes gliding from the everyday real to the hallucinatory, the author has used what he himself calls his "narrative zoom lens." The novel is all but plotless, but the imagery is tellingly vivid, "the literary equivalent of genre painting," according to one critic. 
The participants seem caught in their hard-rock scene, sadly unfree, having neither the will nor the energy to break away. And over all there seems to hang the heavy shadow of self-destructiveness, not only in terms of their present situation but with regard to what the future holds for them--and the question is inescapable, for human society as well? In this mirror reflecting the present, personal relations deteriorate, violence of the moment erupts, and communication inches slowly towards nullity. One asks, eventually, if the hallucinations, whatever their source, are so very far from the vague misgivings and hopeful imaginings of the man in the street. 
The author coolly and unsentimentally distills from this morass a feeling of something pure and unsullied. His technique, with its lack of taboos, of moral condemnation, and of the superfluous, comes very close to the insouciance of cinema verite, in which there is also a touch of surrealism. 
Representing a sharp and conscious turning away from the introspective trend of postwar Japanese literature, this work polarized critics and public alike and soon attracted international attention, a sign of winds of change, if not specifically of things to come.

Contemporary

KODANSHA AMERICA +

Coin Locker Babies

Pushkin Press

Popular Hits of the Showa Era [Paperback] [Jan 01, 1600] Murakami, R.

An ambitious, epic dystopian novel - part political thriller and part satire.  From the Fatherland, with Love is set in an alternative, dystopian present in which the dollar has collapsed and Japan's economy has fallen along with it. The North Korean government, sensing an opportunity, sends a fleet of rebels in the first land invasion that Japan has ever faced. Japan can't cope with the surprise onslaught of Operation From the Fatherland, with Love . But the terrorist Ishihara and his band of renegade youths - once dedicated to upsetting the Japanese government - turn their deadly attention to the North Korean threat. They will not allow Fukuoka to fall without a fight. Epic in scale, From the Fatherland, with Love is laced throughout with Murakami's characteristically savage violence. It's both a satisfying thriller and a completely mad, over-the-top novel like few others. Translated by Ralph McCarthy, Charles De Wolf and Ginny Tapley Takemori, and published by Pushkin Press 'A troubled meditation on the soul of modern Japan...Alarmingly pertinent in light of current British politics...A morbidly funny comedy...Above all, it is a phenomenal feat of storytelling 700 pages, dozens of characters and scores of ideas woven into one gripping whole. ' Andrzej Lukowski, Metro 'This is a novel by the other Murakami. Not Haruki...If Haruki is The Beatles of Japanese literature, Ryu is its Rolling Stones...[From the Fatherland, with Love] has a Tolstoyan cast of characters, from crack North Korean commandos and hapless Japanese bureaucrats to a gang of hoodlums who eventually decide to save Japan. It unfolds with the pace of a thriller...'  David Pilling, Financial TImes  'Massively ambitious and uncompromising...prescient in unexpected ways'  Joanne Hayden, Sunday Business Post  "[Mixes] the thrills of a spy novel with some national soul-searching'  Lionel Barber, Financial Times, Summer Books  'Definitely edgier and darker than Haruki [Ryu Murakami] has a worldwide following and is regarded by many as one of the most thrilling writers of contemporary Japanese fiction...[He] offers a thrilling insight - with a geopolitical panoramic view - into national character, human relationships, chaos and disorder' - Tatevik Sargsyan, Hunger Magazine  Born in 1952 in Nagasaki prefecture, Ryu Murakami is the enfant terrible of contemporary Japanese literature. Awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1976 for his first book, a novel about a group of young people drowned in sex and drugs, he has gone on to explore with cinematic intensity the themes of violence and technology in contemporary Japanese society. His novels include Coin Locker Babies, Sixty-Nine, Popular Hits of the Showa Era, Audition and In the Miso Soup. Murakami is also a screenwriter and a director; his films include Tokyo Decadence, Audition and Because of You.

From the Fatherland with Love (Royal Hardback)

In a small, inconsequential city in Japan, all that matters to 17-year-old Kensuke Yazaki and his friends is girls, rock music and, to a much lesser extent, school. Told at high speed and with irresistible humour by Kensuke himself, this is the story of their 1969, as they engage in heated conversations about Marxism, Rimbaud, Godard, the Beatles and the Stones, set up a barricade in their school, organise a rock festival and map out a highly successful strategy in girl-winning. This is a young Japan entirely turned towards the West, pervaded by Western music, where the girls have nicknames pulled from famous British films, but still locked in a fight with the rigid post-war conservatism of the older generation.

Sixty-Nine

Coin Locker Babies [Paperback] [May 09, 2013] Murakami, R.

Miso soup

Philippe Picquier

Seventeen Drops of Aphrodisiac [In Japanese Language]

Kadokawa Shoten

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Books by Ryū Murakami